UK - LED lighting specialist, MHA Lighting has added two new starters to its sales and communication teams.

Jim Williams joins MHA as regional business manager (Northern), bringing with him a very successful track record of over 20 years' experience in senior sales roles within the lighting industry, with Thorn, Coughtrie and Dialight.

Also moving to MHA is Anthony Monks, who joins as senior communications executive. His experience includes roles with Airbus UK, Lancashire County Council's Brussels Office and Advanced Computer Software Group.

MHA Lighting's managing director Tom Harrison says, "I'm delighted to welcome both Jim and Anthony to MHA Lighting's ever-growing family. They've joined MHA at a very exciting time, as we've secured a number of new exciting projects.

"Jim's extensive experience and strong, established relationships with potential clients wit

UK - For the first time, the prestigious Knights of Illumination Awards, hosted by Clay Paky, incorporated special new effects, much to the delight of both guests and organizers. The awards, which were held on Sunday 9 September at Battersea Evolution in London, honour the achievements in lighting design by the best in our industry and is attended by hundreds of talented and experienced lighting professionals.

The opening sequence to the award portion of the evening began with a woman walking down the aisle toward the stage, holding the coveted Knight of Illumination award - a hand crafted sword. As she walked onto the stage, the sword was suddenly bathed in the light of two Clay Paky Sharpys, positioned on either side of the stage and tracking the sword to centre stage with perfect precision. When guests realized that these were not followspots, and there were no followspot ope

USA - San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge recently celebrated its 75th birthday, paying tribute to one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world. Thanks to W-DMX, tens of thousands of spectators experienced a magnificent and creative light show orchestrated from locations not reachable with cable.

Event producer Don Richards of Foghorn Creative brought in San Francisco-based Lightswitch with lighting designer Norm Schwab to help organise the event. Working with Syncrolite for lighting the bridge, Schwab created a moving tribute with historical significance. The final effect was reminiscent of the Scintillator, a vintage lighting technique using a fan of searchlights that was introduced to the city at the Pan Pacific Exposition in 1915.

The show culminated in a blaze of 75 7K Syncrolite fixtures - the only lights used on the show - 50 of which rose majestically from a barg

UK - Declaring after taking over lighting company SGM last February that his days of producing moving lights were finished forever, word leaked out during PLASA in London this week that SGM's Peter Johansen's R&D team had in fact been feverishly developing radically different LED Spot, Wash and Beam fixtures from their skunk works in Ã…rhus, Denmark.

"We had wanted to keep this under wraps," stated Johansen, "but then someone got hold of our product pipeline and leaked it. When one of our key distributors heard about it, they placed an order for more than 2,000 fixtures ... even though we will not be launching the range until the Prolight+Sound Show in Frankfurt next April."

Up to that point SGM had been denying rumours that they were about to re-enter the moving head arena. And although full details will continue to remain secret, the product's big USP is

Australia / USA - Lighting designer Theo Cox's visual scheme for the current Seal world tour brings a fresh innovative approach, mixing the mediums of lighting, video and automation into a stunning asymmetric swirl of drama, suggestion and energy.

The design has proved extremely popular, and won much industry acclaim as the tour completed its first Australian and US legs, and is ready to hit Europe later in the autumn.

UK based Cox first worked with the multi-award winning musician/singer/songwriter Seal in summer 2011, and was then approached to create a design concept for the upcoming 'Soul 2' tour.

Given a largely open brief for the design, it had to be adaptable to a variety of different venue sizes, ultimately tourable and use kit that could be sourced worldwide as well as fitting into an expedient truck pack!

Evoking a clean, elegant and dynamically different look on

UK - Several years ago, Rosco innovated the concept of "a colour that keeps on giving" and Rick Fisher created Supergel 313, Light Relief Yellow. Rosco committed to make a donation to Light Relief from the income generated by the sales of the colour. This year's cheque presented by Mark Engel, Rosco's CEO brought Rosco's contribution to Light Relief to $28,076.

In presenting the cheque to Matthew Griffiths, Engel said: "Every year, I have the opportunity to stand here with you and present Light Relief with a cheque for the proceeds from global sales of Rosco Supergel 313 Light Relief Yellow. It is one of the most fulfilling moments of the show for me and for Rosco. As you know we work hard to offer real solutions and tools for designers through our products, and working with you to develop this colour that continues year after year to provide much-needed, tangible

UK - Robe lighting enjoyed "a fabulous and highly eventful PLASA 2012 exhibition at Earl's Court".

In addition to a super-busy four-day expo, the Czech moving light manufacturer launched seven new products; won a 2012 PLASA Innovation Award; raised £6,200 for industry charity Light Relief with the auction of a genuine Olympic Torch and hosted a popular party on the Sunday night.

Robe's 'Working With Winners' campaign launched earlier this summer embraced new levels of excitement, with Robe CEO Josef Valchar commenting, "It was an incredible PLASA all round for us - carrying on what's been an amazing year". Robe also celebrated its tenth PLASA.

Back in 2002 the company burst on the scene with its first PLASA as an 'own brand' entity, up to that point having been a quality OEM manufacturer of some experience.

In this short time, Robe has rocketed fr

The Netherlands - Kerkrade in the Netherlands is the home of ADJ Group's European headquarters and has now become a 'Center of Communication and Technology Exchange' for the company. Elation and AD Systems, as part of the ADJ Group portfolio, now benefits from the opening of a completely new-built facility. The Customer Care Center offers hands-on fixture tests, comprehensive fixture comparison possibilities and personal and competent Support Personnel accompanied with individual design and programming options. The Customer Care Center is open daily on weekdays and ADJ personnel will to do their outmost to turn your individual requests into reality, says the Group.

In addition to the new Customer Care Centre, the company has launched a set of themed seminar days. The PRO(theme)days are intended for those customers looking for the direct contact with the manufacturer, searching f

UK - Rosco has formed a joint venture partnership with The Black Tank, an advanced engineering group located north of Boston, MA to design, develop and distribute LED lighting fixtures to the entertainment and architecture markets.

The immediate result of this partnership was seen last weekend at the opening of the IBC Exhibition in Amsterdam and at the PLASA Show in London where Rosco debuted Miro Cube, its new line of wash lights based on Black Tank's successful Brick Blaster fixtures. Three luminaires - Miro Cube 4C, Miro Cube WNC, and Miro Cube UV as well as a range of innovative mounting accessories - are targeted at lighting professionals in live entertainment, film & television, museums & architecture, and theme parks.

"First of all, the products are fantastic. The engineering is so elegant and the light output is astounding. You can't believe it's coming out of th

USA - Chauvet Professional will showcase a wide variety of products at this year's Worship Facilities Conference & Expo show, scheduled for 19-21 September in Atlanta, Ga.

On display at will be fixtures from the VIP Series of video products, the new line of trussing TRUSST, Parnelli Awards nominee Legend 412 pixel-mapping moving yoke and powerful moving yokes Q-Spot 560-LED and Q-Wash 560Z-LED.

Representing the COLORado family of wash lights are COLORado Zoom Tour, COLORado Zoom WW Tour and COLORado Zoom 2 Tour fixtures.

Additionally, Chauvet Professional will highlight fixtures from the Iluminarc line of architainment interior and exterior lighting solutions.

(Jim Evans)

UK - Entertainment lighting specialist White Light has been involved with what The Guardian newspaper has described as an 'innovative art project' - NVA's Speed of Light, running in Edinburgh for the duration of this year's Festival.

An outdoor lighting project, NVA's Speed of Light created shapes and patterns of light across the giant volcanic hill, Arthur's Seat, which sits on the edge of the city of Edinburgh. The lighting was a living, moving, dynamic thing created by living, moving, dynamic performers - who wore suits of wirelessly controlled, battery powered LEDs and so were also the show's lighting rig!

The performers' movements across the vast expanse of Arthur's Seat, which rises to 251m at its peak, were precisely choreographed, while their lighting was equally precisely cued from a grandMA console. The lighting data was transmitted from the cont

UK - Hundreds of lighting professionals donned their finest outfits and put on their dancing shoes for the fifth Knight of Illumination Awards (KOI), held in London on 10 September.

The popular awards, organised by The Society of Television & Lighting Design (STLD), The Association of Lighting Designers (ALD) and Clay Paky, celebrate the work of lighting designers working in the UK.

The aim: to provide public recognition for outstanding achievements in touring, television and theatre lighting design, and forge closer ties between designers and the industry as a whole.

Hosted by Andy Collins, this year KOI was held at London's Battersea Evolution. The celebrations attracted a strong turn-out with over 450 lighting professionals from the worlds of TV, theatre and rock. Guests included lighting designers from all disciplines, production companies, trade associations and members

UK - Rachel Bottomley of Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA) has won this year's Michael Northen Bursary (MNB), picking up a £500 cash award.

The Bursary is awarded annually to a student or recent graduate who has demonstrated strong, imaginative and creative lighting designs. It is organised by the Association of Lighting Designers, a professional body representing lighting designers in the live performance industry.

Northen was both a former chairman and president of the ALD and the first credited lighting designer in the UK.

Each year an award of £500 is presented to a young lighting designer who has shown excellence in the field of lighting design. The project must be a performance based lighting design in or out of the college environment. Two runner-up prizes of £250 each are also presented: an ETC sponsored award, and the ALD-sponsored Fran

UK - ETC's new Source Four LED luminaire has won the prestigious PLASA Award for Sustainability at this year's PLASA 2012 show in London, against some strong competition.

Performing at 30 to over 40 lumens per watt, the Source Four LED spotlight excels in efficacy. This powerful yet energy-saving light creates beauty and artistry in stage, studio and architectural applications. It combines the popular features of ETC's conventional Source Four profile spotlight with the intelligence and seven colours of ETC's Selador Desire LED luminaires. And it comes in three different models - the Lustr+, Tungsten, and Daylight - each using just a fraction of the electricity of its incandescent counterpart. As the PLASA judges also commented: "[The Source Four LED] has a highly efficient optical system, and you can reuse existing lens stock."

ETC's CEO Fred Foster responded to the

UK - With international sales of ETC's iRFR application for Apple's iPhone, iPod touch and iPad and the new aRFR application for Android devices now approaching4,500, the company this year presented Light Relief with a cheque for an amazing £16,855 as the UK charity's share of the profits.

When the app was first introduced in 2009, Luke Delwiche from ETC Tech Services in London suggested that the profits be shared between Light Relief and its US equivalent, Behind the Scenes. Since then, the sales of the app have raised over $200,000 for the two charities.

Thanks must go to the apps' developers, Chris Mizerak and Anders Ekvall, for designing such a popular app, which enables users to turn any mobile device into a touchscreen-based remote controller for Eos- and Congo-family control desks, Eos and Ion Remote Processor Units (RPUs) and the Congo Light Server. And, of cours

Sweden - SGM A/S has recruited the experienced Mikael Uddh to handle the Danish manufacturer's portfolio of LED products on an exclusive basis, under the newly-formed SGM Sweden.

Uddh is already familiar with SGM product distribution from his time with Interlite, having previously joined sister company, Wireless DMX as key account sales manager for Europe four years ago.

The Swede says he is now relishing the challenge of marketing the groundbreaking range of high premium low energy solutions to the core rental, broadcast, architectural and retail segments under the new company.

Speaking of the move, he said, "I first met [CEO Peter Johansen] at Prolight+Sound in Frankfurt this year. Having worked in lighting for 20 years and been associated with major manufacturers including ETC, Arri and Vari-Lite - as well as SGM - I didn't want to pass the opportunity by when I saw

Germany - MediaLas has added new enhancements to the high end Infinity show laser projectors. Already the recipient of two industry awards, the Infinity is still MediaLas' "top-of-the-line product with many unconventional und extremely useful features for professional event companies and exclusive clubs."

"Besides the well-known, superb beam and color quality, the Infinity has been enhanced on the processing side," says the company. "A new firmware boosts both safety and reliability of the entire system. The computerized safety inside the Infinity even corrects user programming errors in some ways, be limiting the single point exposure time of the laser deflection system, and therefore smoothing the total irradiance of high powered laser rays. Further firmware updates have been released for the network client inside the Infinity, that allows to control t

RSC Record - The Royal Shakespeare Company has reported its financial results for 2011/12 - the first year in its new Stratford-upon-Avon home. Its annual report reveals that the company has recorded a turnover of more than £50m for the first time ever.

Box office takings have more than doubled to £18.1m from £8.3m in 2010/11, when the company had reduced operations due to the refurbishment of the Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theatres. Its audience almost doubled between the two seasons - up to 708,022 people in 2011/12. Percentage capacity remained static at 89%.

The results were reported at the RSC's annual general meeting in Stratford, which saw artistic director Michael Boyd and executive director Vikki Heywood hand over to Gregory Doran and Catherine Mallyon respectively.

NT in NYC - The National Theatre has announced that it is opening a New York

UK - The new Philips Platinum 5R beam moving head is at the heart of PR Lighting's latest automated stage light, the XR 200 Beam.

Sturdy, compact and with a highly developed optical path, the fixture offers "enormous brightness in a compact form factor, with a weight of just 16kg".

At the same time, PR Lighting has worked considerably on the design and structure so that in addition to its weight advantage the movement is also faster and the running much quieter, while the legendary colour, gobo and prism/frost filter wheel ensure that it is fully featured. In fact the colour wheel boasts 14 dichroic colours, the fixed gobo wheel has 17 gobos (plus white) and the Prism/Frost Wheel contains CTO, frost, and 8-facet prism (plus white). The fixture offers 540° pan and 270° tilt, with a beam angle of 0°-4° (linearly adjustable).

(Jim Evans)

Iceland - The prestigious Reykjavik City Theatre is delivering new dynamic lighting options to designers of its varied program of productions with a new installation of Vari-Lite VL1100TS luminaires.

Head of lighting Thordur Orri Petursson commented that, "After a shoot-out between VL1100 TS and other brands in the venue, it was decided that the VL1100 was the most suitable product to take the brunt of the FOH lighting."

The VL1100 TS offer a variety of strengths that make it a must-have for the Theatre, but as Petursson said, "The deciding factor was the CYM colour-mixing, the number of gobos it can hold, and the overall size of the fixture."

Icelandic sales and rental company Luxor supplied the lights. Luxor sales manager Alfred Sturla Bodvarsson oversaw the installation along with Petursson and respected Philips Vari-Lite trainer Coral Cooper, winner o

France - Robert Juliat has announces the appointment of Claus Spreyer as its new sales director.

Claus Spreyer comes to the company with an abundance of experience and knowledge from many years in the industry. During this time, he was with Lightpower/MA Lighting, Germany, where he was responsible for all partner relations, then two years ago joined A & O, the Germany-based, leading manufacturer of Sky Tracers, in the position of Executive Vice President.

As Sales Director at Robert Juliat, Spreyer will participate in raising the brand to an even higher level and extending its technology leadership position through unique innovations.

"I've known Robert Juliat for a long time and I'm now looking forward to bringing in all my knowledge, my international contacts and all my strong relationships to the lighting industry into Robert Juliat. Understanding how the industry wo

South Africa - Robe moving lights were again at the hub of the lighting action for a Main Stage design by Johan Ferreira from JSF Productions at the popular 2012 Innibos Festival in South Africa.

The festival recently won a KykNET Fiestas Award for 2011's Best Festival.

The four-day arts and culture extravaganza, held in Nelspruit at the Bergvlam School Grounds, was attended by 120,000 people. Technical production for the Main and Klipdrift stages was supplied by Martindale, Gauteng based rental company Sound Headquarters, and it was Ferreira's seventh year of designing the lighting.

With the additional resonance of the Award win, more audience were expected and the organisers wanted to generally up the ante on the look and feel of the event and in particular the Main Stage, so Ferreira set about designing something special.

The Robe fixtures totalled 52 - a mix of Robin 6

UK - A change in the performance schedule of the musical The Lion King during the 2012 Olympics gave entertainment lighting specialist White Light just the window of opportunity it required to replace the entire dimming system at London's Lyceum Theatre - without affecting a single performance of the hit show!

The Ambassadors Theatre Group decided to replace the installation because of concerns about the ongoing availability of spare parts for the Strand LD90s, installed as part of the Lyceum's dramatic reconstruction in 1996. In consultation with White Light, it was decided to replace them with ETC Sensor 3 racks, now convincingly established as the dimmer of choice in the West End with White Light having completed installations at the Piccadilly and the Vaudeville theatres, amongst others.

A like-for-like replacement was decided upon, with White Light supplying four 4

UK - In a summer to remember, Lucozade's YES! Arena played host to many exciting moments. For the YES! Arena festival tour, Lucozade teamed up with five of the biggest music festivals in the UK - to provide high energy music, fun in the sun, and an experience that festival goers are not soon to forget. Entertainment lighting specialist White Light was tapped by brand experience agency TRO to provide lighting, rigging, staging, and power to the Lucozade YES! Arena festival tour.

Fans came to see artists such as Snow Patrol, The Killers, Ed Sheerhan, Nicki Manaj, Florence + The Machine and more, but were pleased to discover the excitement going on in the Lucozade Arena. As visitors showed up to concerts across the UK, they were surprised by Lucozade giveaways, their favourite music, and of course, an impressive light show in the YES! Arena.

With everything ready, the festival to

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